Polly wrote this article for a mailing list. All information about other submissives on that list has been removed to protect the members' privacy.

I'd like to know from others what it is that they dislike about computer communications, be it email, chat rooms, news groups, on-line personals, Web sites, whatever. How have you been burned? What is it about the virtual life that most gets your goat? How, in your opinion, is cyber life different from real life?

When I try to answer my own questions, I find that there are so many things I dislike about cyber-communications that it is hard to narrow it down to an answer that isn't 20 pages long. I guess, though, that the thing I hate most about the on-line environment is the way in which it attracts so many emotionally and mentally disturbed people. Individuals whom one would quickly cross the street to avoid in real life become stars or gurus on the nets. On-line communications attracts people with something to hide, as it is so easy to seem to be someone or something other than who or what you are when all people have to get to know you with are your typed words. This form of communicating is incredibly seductive to people who are severely dysfunctional in in-person social encounters--hiding safely behind a screen takes away almost all social anxiety. And while that can be good for certain types of people (the pathologically shy suddenly have a means to express themselves), it tends to make most people who are already sick and dysfunctional even more so.

The cyber world attracts many obsessive people, who cannot control the time they spend on line and who take everything that happens in this artificial environment way too seriously. Unfortunately, such pathetic people, because of their apparent seriousness and willingness to spend all of their free time (and most of their work time!) on line, are often highly admired by others, as they are usually the most prolific contributors to whatever cyber worlds they choose to inhabit. No one else can keep up with their volume. This obsessiveness, besides causing such people to neglect whatever shreds of a real life they might have, becomes, after a while, a strongly negative force. When the honeymoon phase of life in the virtual world wears off, these people become the cyber-cops, the people who carry grudges and engage in on-line vendettas, the rigid attackers or upholders of rules, the constant whiners about how great Cyber Place X used to be before all these new people came, the cyber personalities who evoke hatred, fear, or revulsion in the rest of us.

Even ordinary, nice people often become pretty awful on line, as the buffered safety of this medium seems to lower inhibitions faster than guzzling a bottle of fortified wine would. Ordinarily decent people say things and do things on line that they would never consider saying or doing if they were face to face with you. This is a medium of egotistical rudeness, of ruthless aggression where people who are friends one day are dire enemies the next, and of a weird kind of showing off and one-upmanship: the sort of showing off that can only be done with rhetorical games such as logic chopping, dictionary-definition quoting, and calculated fits of outrage, and with building a strong "gang" or following of virtual henchmen who staunchly support you and attack anyone who doesn't.

When you participate in the "virtual world," you're much more likely to run into either really sick fucks or normal people who act very screwy and far ruder than they would ever do in real life. Add to this volatile mix another odd cyber phenomenon: the fact that this medium seems to make many of us open up and confess things to people we barely know about our lives, hopes, feelings, and identities that we would never in a million years reveal to a real-life stranger until we are sure that we can trust them. The security of being behind a computer screen, where no one can jump out and grab us, makes some of us much less cautious than we would ordinarily be. But our sense of security is, of course illusory, and some of us find this fact out in really terrible ways.

Of course, when you mix people who are incautiously confessing intimate details of their life stories online with people who are severely disturbed or who at least have lost all inhibitions about using what they find out against the confessor, you get the bizarre comic-tragedies that are a daily occurrence on the nets. The vendettas. The stalkings. The harassment. The breaking of confidentiality. The hacking. The ego wars. The outings. And hundreds of people who feel deeply hurt and betrayed. I've had it happen to me. So has everybody I know who uses this means of communication to any extent. If it weren't so tragic, if so many people's lives and hopes were not ruined by this sort of thing, it'd actually be funny. It looks, from the outside, as if all these adults with their children, important careers, and other responsibilities suddenly decide that when they're on line, they're all going to regress to their teen years and act like high-school kids! I mean, doesn't all the clique forming, the backstabbing, the ego wars, the sucking up to the "popular kids," the false acts and lying, and all the rest of this sick shit remind you of your dear old high-school days? Anything that can make an otherwise responsible and confident adult regress to a sad, immature time in her life, a time when she was at her most insecure and confused (and often did the most stupid things because of this) is not something that I would recommend to my friends as a good place to be.

Unfortunately, a lot of my kinky friends were already enmeshed in this world before I met them, and all of them, to a lesser or greater degree, have suffered because of it. I think that those of us who can see through the shiny veneer of the virtual world have an obligation to those who think it's the greatest thing since white bread to try to inject a little sobering reality into their fantasies wherever possible, as such shots of reality will give them something to hang onto later, something to remember and to use when their oh-so-marvelous virtual world starts to unravel before their eyes and their oh-so-marvelous virtual friends abandon or betray them.

As if the crazies, the predators, and the assholes weren't enough, there's also that nasty little problem of how easy it is to misunderstand someone else when all you're doing is typing at each other. With no gestures, no facial expressions, no tones of voice to clue you in, even the clearest of writers get into some horrible mixups. Well-intentioned Person A doesn't realize that well-intentioned Person B was making a joke in her last email, and voila! Well-intentioned Person A, feeling hurt and betrayed, lays into well-intentioned Person B, who, in her turn, shocked at A's sudden outburst of vitriol, gives back as good as she gets.

Finally, there is the issue of the way cyber-conformity promotes the worst sort of misinformation. Any semi-formal social group imposes a structure; a set of rules; some spoken, some not; and an ideology upon its members. While aspects of that ideology help to provide a structure and a set of guidelines for the group and help non-members to know whether this is the sort of group they want to belong to, often that ideology consists of truisms or wisdoms that are not true or wise at all, they're just things that the group accepts as true, usually because it calms fears or boosts egos to believe that they are true or because someone with a lot of social power but who isn't very bright or experienced has pushed them on the rest of the group. (A couple of examples of untrue BDSM truisms: "People into S&M are more intelligent than the average person on the street." Or "You can't be a good top unless you've first been a bottom." The first untrue truism is one that is uttered by members of many minority groups. People always think that members of the groups they associate with contain a better quality of person than those in the general population. This belief is primarily an ego thing. It makes you feel good about your particular group if you think this. Of course, it's not true. The second untrue truism is a concept that originally came from the world of gay leathermen, but it has been widely adopted by hetero kinky people over the years. Again, it fills an ego need. Many people who have submissive experiences and then later decide that they are dominants are ashamed of having first been submissive. This saying thus manages to justify to these insecure people their submissive experience--make it OK--at the same time as it, in their own estimates, puts them above the entire group of natural dominants, people who cannot and will not ever have a submissive experience.)

People who don't believe in or conform to the ruling ideology of a group are ostracized from the group no matter how intelligent or important or real their contributions might otherwise be. In this context, groups seem to go through a life cycle. At first they are relatively flexible and open to new ideas. But as they age and as a cadre of powerful and respected "old timers" develops (I see this cadre as a huge accretion of barnacles on the underbelly of a ship that makes travel in that ship much more dangerous and difficult), the group starts to discourage diversity and new ideas, as these are seen as challenging and threatening to the way it is used to doing and thinking about things. Remember, the people who will inevitably end up on top in these groups are usually the most dysfunctional and obsessive individuals there. And these people will push their often self-serving and usually wrong ideas--about BDSM, for example--onto the rest of the group. New ideas threaten the social power the old-timers have built up for themselves (often a new idea or experience will contradict the comfortably old "truths" that the old-timers push as the way things always are, therefore the person who presents the new idea has to be attacked and shown to be bad, sick, manipulative, or lying) within the group and therefore must be repressed. I know of no cure for this. All groups go through this process.

What this group life-cycle stuff means for cyber life is that the BDSM virtual communities you join, be these chat channels, mailing lists, news groups, or whatever, are likely to be circulating a set of ideas and attitudes about dominance and submission that range from the incredibly stupid to the just plain wrong. But everybody who's anybody within the group adheres to these ideas as the purest fact. When someone tries to speak up in such a group and say that "the emperor has no clothes," such a person will be derided, ridiculed, attacked, and as quickly as possible driven from the group. So cyber groups are responsible for a whole lot of the misinformation that circulates on the nets about D&S, misinformation that hurts us all, because it gives us false expectations and causes us to make wrong assumptions and decisions.

I hate all of this about the "cyber world," but even more I hate how people, despite these ugly and gruesome realities, praise it as some wonderful new way of communicating, something revolutionary and freeing. A better way of communicating. A better place to be than fact-to-face with someone. Better, my ass! It's the least effective, most isolating, crappiest form of communication there is. It's only advantages are that it is relatively instantaneous (but even that can be a disadvantage; how many impatient, petulant children have you known who totally freak out and think you hate them if you don't answer their email within two hours after you have received it?) and that it allows you access to people and ideas that you might not find easily were you trying to seek them out in the real world. The best thing that can be said about the "cyber world," I believe, is that it can act as a bridge to something real, to something better than what you currently have. For BDSM'ers, it's also a temporary respite from the loneliness and isolation that so many of us feel in our actual physical communities. We may find the dominant of our dreams on line far more quickly than we could if searching in person. But in trying to speed up the process of meeting our deepest needs and desires, we run the risk of getting lost in the virtual hype: of coming to believe that an impoverished and alienating means of communication is somehow realer and better than the richer forms it replaces. And if we believe that hype, we're lost. Not only does this pathetic virtual world become a substitute for real life in all its multi-sensory richness, but it will only be a matter of time before our naive Pollyannaish dreams for the wunnerful, wunnderful "world of cyber" come crashing around our heads.

Want some living examples of what's been talked about above? Take a look at these pages:

It's a Wastland Out there

The Laughing Gallery

Readers who enjoyed this article may also wish to look at Jon's and Polly's IRC Speeches.